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WAKE UP AMERICA! 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
TOKONTO 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 



BY 

MARK SULLIVAN 



BetD gotit 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 



All rights reserved 



6^ 



Copyright, 1918 
By p. F. Collier and Son 

copyeight, 1918 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electro typed. Published, April, 1918 



M/iy -9 1918 
©CI.A497238 



d 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 



THE war did not come to us as 
it came to Belgium. No Oregon 
rancher, working in his field on a 
peaceful afternoon, was disturbed by 
an odd whirring in the sunny air, and 
looked toward Mount Hood to see an 
airplane spitting fire upon his neigh- 
bouring village. In no New England 
town did children huddle in the 
windows and peer at exultant Uhlans 
prancing down the maple-shaded 
street. No Maryland farmer from his 
hilltop field saw a thing that sent him 
hurrying to the house to gather his 

children into his cart and take to the 

1 



2 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

road in fear. No city of ours walked 
for days in anxiety, listening to the 
rise and fall of a fateful cannonade. 
War did not thunder at our doors as at 
the forts of Liege. 



II 



/^ F the way that war came to 
^^ Belgium and to France there 
are two pictures which, among Ameri- 
can witnesses, surpass all others and 
are unforgetable. One is in the 
letters home of an American woman. 
Miss Mildred Aldrich, who in June 
preceding the war had gone to a 
village in rural France for rest. It is 
part of the irony of the times that in 
her first letter, written six weeks be- 
fore the war began, she should have 
said: "I have come to feel the need 
of calm and quiet — perfect peace." 

Among the simple, friendly farmers 
she found the gentle serenity that she 
sought. She lived alone in her cot- 
tage, and used to smile at herself for 



4 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

keeping up her American precaution 
of fastening the doors and windows 
when she went to bed at night. But 
one day the garde champetre with his 
drum walked up the country street, 
stopping at each crossroad to beat the 
long roll — "A chill ran down my 
spine," she wrote. Then she began to 
notice the airplanes hurrying from 
Paris to the front, and at night the 
nearby railway rumbled with the troop 
trains going by. Presently, war rolled 
right up to her peaceful door-step, a 
little band of tired and harried 
soldiers who said quite simply: "We 
are all that is left of the North Irish 
Horse." 

The other American, Brand Whit- 
lock, was Heaven-sent to Belgium. 
Not for his administrative accomplish- 
ments as our ambassador; that might 
well have been done as capably by an- 
other. But if a survey had been made 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 5 

of all the professional writers in 
America, if the acutest intelligence had 
been exerted to find that one writer 
with the talent and the personality to 
picture how the greatest tragedy in 
history blasted its way across the 
peaceful sunshine of August in Bel- 
gium, Brand Whitlock might well 
have been chosen. He had the sensi- 
tiveness to see and the skill to make 
vivid. 

"Lovely Brussels," he wrote, "was 
lovelier than ever, but somehow with 
a wistful, waning loveliness in- ^ 
finitely pathetic. All over the 
Quartier Leopold the white fagades ^ 
of the houses bloomed with flags, their 
black and red and yellow colours 
transparent in the sunlight; in the 
Foret the sunlight filtered through 
the leaves, irradiating the green 
boles of the trees, and through the 
hazy sunlight that lay on the fields 



6 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

the mound of Waterloo was outlined 
against the sky. In the Bois. in the 
xziid^ of woodland pe^ce^ the chil- 
dren were playing and lover? whis- 
pej^d still their marvellous discover- 
ies. Who • . . can think of those 
days . . . without the memon* of 
that wonderful sunlight which filled 
them to the hiim? Day after day 
went by, witli e^ch new morning the 
miracle was renewed." 

And then: 

*'The crash of the music of a mili- 
tary band, high, shrill with the fierce, 
screaming notes, the horrid clang of 
mammoth brass c^Tubals. not music^ 
but noise of a calculated savagery, to 
strike terror. The Prussian officers 
"with cruel faces scarred by dueling. 
Some of the heavier type with rolls 
of fat the mark of the beast, as 
Emerson calls it. at the back of the 
nedi, and red, heavy, brutal faces 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 7 

looking aLout over the heads of the 
silent, awed, saddened crowd, with 
arrogant, insolent, contemptuous 
faces! The heavy guns that lurched 
by, their mouths of steel lowered to- 
ward the ground. It became terrible, 
oppressive, unendurable, monstrous, 
those black guns on grey carriages; 
those field-grey uniforms, the insolent 
faces of those supercilious young offi- 
cers; those dull plodding soldiers, 
those thews and sinews, the heels of 
those clumsy boots drumming on the 
pavements," 



Ill 

IVTOT like that did war come to us. 
"^ ^ It did not assault our eyes, our 
ears, our nostrils (some day get Will 
Irwin to tell you of the smell of war) . 
It did not come to us as a thing spurt- 
ing blood and belching thunder. To 
us war came rather as something on 
paper, as a thing of documents, and 
statutes and refinements of interna- 
tional law, a thing of whereases and 
therefores. Moreover, the quibbling, 
the note writing, the refining of verbal 
distinctions, had been going on for 
more than two years. 

And war having come to us in this 
way, there was not in it the quality to 
stir our emotions. "Flag-decked City 
is Calm," said the headline in the New 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 9 

York Times on the day that President 
Wilson read his message. And the 
bloodiest thing that happened to us in 
connection with the war that day was 
recorded in headlines of the same size: 
"Senator Lodge Knocks Down a Paci- 
j&st." 



IV 



A ND, since the war came to us in 
■^ ■*• that way, the question was, and a1 
the end of a year still is, have we the 
imagination and that sympathy which 
in sensitive peoples can take the place 
of eyes and ears? Can we know war 
vicariously, through feeling for the 
Belgians and the French? Have we 
now the emotion of war? Are we 
really at war in our hearts? Have we 
felt 

"That leap of heart whereby a people rise 
Up to a noble anger's height?" 

Have we had the thing that is neces- 
sary to "stiffen the sinews, summon up 
the blood, disguise fair nature with 
hard-favoured rage?" That is part of 

10 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 11 

what is meant when people talk of a 
nation's "morale." Germany thinks 
we have not got it, and there are those 
among the subtle who believe that Ger- 
many has conducted herself during the 
past years with an eye to refraining 
from anything that would give us this 
lofty anger. For the theory is that 
without this emotion a nation can not 
fight with the energy that alone can 
make effective war. 

War, after all, when you get down 
to its essencCj is sticking a bayonet 
into another man's stomach — and 
pulling it out and sticking it in again. 
It is the second thrust that is impor- 
tant; that can only be inspired by 
high anger. It is not a thing that a 
man can do except in emotion. It is 
against all reason. It is against ev- 
^ry moral instinct. It is contrary to 
all the habits of our ordered lives. 
It bajinot be done in cold blood. One 



12 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

wonders if it can be done with the 
hands, while with the lips you talk 
peace. 

It is recognized that for war every 
nation needs this emotion. The ex- 
citement that supplies it comes some- 
times one way, sometimes another. In 
the Civil War, the excitant was sup- 
plied by the firing on the American 
flag. The people had endured the se- 
cession of six States ; they had endured 
the formal organization of the Confed- 
erate Government; they had endured 
the adoption by that Government of a 
permanent Constitution. But there 
was still wanting the thing that would 
make the nation flame. That want 
was supplied by the firing on the flag 
at Fort Sumter. J. G. Holland's 
"Life of Lincoln" expresses it: 

"The North needed just this. Such 
a universal burst of patriotic indigna- 
tion as ran over the North under the 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 13 

injfluence of this insult to the National 
flag has never been witnessed. It 
swept away all party lines as if it 
had been flame and they had been 
wax." 

Once during this war we had the 
excitant. Once we had the begin- 
nings of the emotion. Once we felt 
in our hearts that rising flame which 
burns out self and fuses the indi- 
vidual into the nation. That was the 
morning after the Lusitania was sunk, 
when the German nation was revealed 
to us as something diff'erent from the 
German friends we knew, as some- 
thing else than our smiling, good- 
natured, sentimental friend of the beer 
garden and the Strauss waltzes; when 
we learned that the German had sur- 
rendered his will and his conscience 
and his soul, and put them at the dis- 
posal of the cruel will of a pagan 
autocracy. The German, under the 



14 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

yoke and spell of that brutal will, 
was revealed to us as a man who mur- 
ders women and children, and then 
exults over it. And they were our 
women and children, dependent on 
our protection, trustful of our will to 
avenge them. Perhaps as they went 
down they extracted a measure of 
noble serenity from the thought that 
their death would not be in vain, that 
we would avenge them and that 
through them Belgium would be 
avenged, too ; that they were the sacri- 
fice chosen by fate to rouse this easy- 
going giant of the West. And we 
were aroused. Our blood did rise to 
the call. 

On that sunny morning in May, 
1915, the tamest and lamest of us 
would have shouldered a rifle. But 
President Wilson thought that nego- 
tiation was better. He threw water 
on the rising flame. Since the Lusi- 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 15 

tania, now within a few weeks of 
three years ago, was sunk there has 
not been any time when this nation 
has had the feeling of war, the thing 
that puts punch behind the bayonet. 
Not yet. 



Xp NGLAND'S first year of the war 
■■-^ was completed a long time ago, 
on August 4, 1915. But what a dif- 
ferent first year it was from ours! 
On that first anniversary England held 
a solemn service in St. Paul's Cathe- 
dral. Solemn it well might be. She 
numbered her dead in hundreds of 
thousands. Week after week the 
lists had come back, a thousand, 
three thousand, five thousand. The 
wounded, the wreckage of war, thrust 
themselves on England's eyes in every 
street and country road. The enemy 
had been literally at her throat. He 
had been on her soil. England had 
been in the fire. She had passed 
through Mons and Ypres and the sec- 

16 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 17 

ond Ypres. She had seen new forms 
of death, ingenious, monstrous. She 
had tasted horrors — as we have not. 

For although we have been for- 
mally in the war for exactly a year at 
the time this is written, we have not 
yet come to dread the day that brings 
the week's casualty list, nor learned to 
cover with silence the fresh draft on 
our fortitude. When we pick the 
day's paper up, we have not had the 
occasion to cover grief with serenity, 
as a duty to our neighbour with a simi- 
lar grief. Our wounded have not 
come limping back to our doorsteps. 
Our sons have not come home to us 
in winding sheets. 

In describing that solemn anniver- 
sary service in St. Paul's, and sum- 
ming up the first year of the war, the 
London Times was able to say of the 
English people: 

"They have borne the ordeal in a 



18 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

fashion to which their children may 
look back with thankfulness and 
pride. The ordeal has been the hard- 
est they could have been called upon 
to undergo . . . They have made un- 
precedented sacrifices of treasure and 
blood, they have endured many vicissi- 
tudes and suffered many disappoint- 
ments. After all their losses and 
their efforts, the end is still remote. 
They know it, and with one accord 
they face the situation with a rising 
courage and a gathering resolve. No- 
where is there a whisper of doubt, of a 
shadow of irresolution." 

And right there is the difference. 
We have reached the end of our first 
year of war. And — it is said not in 
any spirit of self-reproach but as a 
simple record of fact — we have noth- 
ing yet to which ''our children may 
look back with thankfulness and 
pride." We have had no ordeal; we 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 19 

have not been touched by the fire. 
The flower and fruit of war is sacri- 
fice, and we have made no sacrifice. 
The spiritual gain of war is sacrifice, 
and we have gained nothing. We 
have reaped nothing. 
But all in good time. 



VI 



T^HE people of the United States, 
-*- during the early weeks of the 
present year, had what might be de- 
scribed accurately as their first shock 
of war. It was not much of a shock. 
The people awoke one morning to be 
confronted with an order from their 
Government commanding them to close 
down some of their shops and some of 
their places of amusement for a half a 
dozen days, more or less. They got 
very much excited about that. In- 
deed, I know few things so little to our 
national credit as the chorus of angry 
irritation which swept over the land 
because of that casual inconvenience 
to our settled ways. To be sure, the 

20 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 21 

order was awkwardly conceived in 
some of its details, and was put into 
execution somewhat precipitately. 
But it was neither as awkward nor as 
precipitate as shells dropping into 
your front yard, or a hostile army 
marching down your principal street. 
In all the angry outburst I can recall 
but one newspaper, the New York 
Globe, among those I happened to 
read, that took the other note, remind-^ 
ing its readers that after all we are 
at war, and I shall always think 
with pleasure of that one Southern 
Governor who, when a New York news- 
paper was soliciting statements for an / 
organized campaign of denunciation, 
replied that he did not have access to 
as many of the facts as Dr. Garfield 
had, and that in the absence of such 
knowledge, he chose to assume that the 
order was justified by some exigency 
of a nation engaged in war. 



22 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

There could be no surer sign that 
psychologically we are not yet at war 
than the spirit in which we received 
that first mild shock, and it did not 
bode well for our national morale 
when, ultimately, war calls upon us 
for real emergencies and sacrifices of 
the kind that our Allies have come to 
take as a matter of course. One 
wonders just how deep our stores of 
fortitude will turn out to be. 

That first shock last winter was but 
a premonitory tremor compared to the 
shocks that are certain to come upon 
us during the next few months. 

We thought of that recent shock in 
terms of coal, partly because it came 
from Dr. Garfield, and partly because 
Dr. Garfield, not fully understanding 
it himself, phrased it in terms of coal. 
In reality it was not a crisis of coal, 
but a crisis of ships. If the events 
which led up to the order were set 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 23 

down in sequence, they would read 
like this: 

England cabled us a call for sup- 
plies so urgent in its need that any ex- 
pedient was justifiable; the ships to 
carry these supplies were in American 
harbours unable to sail; they were un- 
able to sail because they had not been 
coaled. And the reason they had not 
been coaled was not the lack of coal. 
The coal was there — but the docks and 
terminals were so congested with every 
sort of supplies that it was impossible 
to get the coal from the sidings on to 
the ships. Dr. Garfield's closing of 
factories was designed primarily, not 
to save coal, but to prevent the further 
accumulation and congestion of goods 
which there were no ships to carry. 
Now if in February this lack of ships 
is an inconvenience, in July it is going 
to be a calamity. 



VII 

n^HE American people have got to 
-*- visualize this problem. They 
have got to put their imaginations on 
it until they realize it, and carry it 
about with them as the most important 
fact of their lives. They must see on 
one side of the Atlantic Ocean their 
new-bom army; they must see on the 
other side of the Atlantic Ocean the 
food and supplies to keep that army 
alive. And they must understand that 
the only thing that joins the two is a 
thin and fragile line three thousand 
miles long. There are many dra- 
matic aspects to this war, but I know 
of none so appealing as this frail line 
(which to most of us is merely a series 
of dots upon a map), made up of ex- 

24 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 25 

ceedingly perishable ships, all too few 
in number at best, only about one to 
every two or three miles — and every 
few hours one of them feels the 
dreaded shudder, topples and is swal- 
lowed up. 

This picture is drawn to simplify es- 
sential truth. It is not overdramatic. 
That line is the umbilical cord of our 
little army, and the submarine is 
gnawing at it every hour of the day. 
More than that, it is the alimentary 
canal for a large part of the Allied 
armies, of the Belgian people, and of 
the sorely pressed women and children 
of England, France and Italy. Every 
rifle made in America is of no avail 
unless it passes successfully from end 
to end of that long, thin line. Every 
shell, every gun, every pound of meat, 
every grain of wheat, every airplane, 
the work of every factory in the coun- 
try, every village making Red Gross 



26 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

bandages, every mother writing a let- 
ter to her soldier son, is dependent 
upon the maintenance of that line, 
and it is not being maintained. 

"Not being maintained" is an ab- 
straction. The casual reader may 
hurry over it without really taking it 
in. But we all must pause upon it 
until we do take it in. We must 
brood upon it. We must force our 
imaginations to grapple with this 
statement, until we can visualize it, 
until we understand what it means in 
terms of life and death. Every 
mother must see her son at the head 
of a trench, in that ultimate contest 
of hand and will, to which war sooner 
or later comes. She must see him 
alone, fighting for life, for his per- 
sonal life, pouring out his bullets and 
his strength as he must; she must see 
him at the first moment when it comes 
upon him that his bullets and his 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 27 

strength are running low; she must 
see him in a second of respite turning 
his head to see if help is coming, if 
more bullets are being brought to him, 
if a comrade is hurrying to his sup- 
port; she must see that quick back- 
ward look again and again, until at 
last there is despair in it. She must 
know that if help does not come it is 
because there was not at that spot the 
quantity that we call enough, that 
quantity than which one bullet less is 
failure. And if there is not enough, 
it is because of one thing: the bullets 
were at the factory in abundant 
plenty, the soldiers were called and 
trained and ready in the cantonments; 
but somewhere in that long thin line, 
from the lone outpost on the battle 
front, back to the bullets factory in 
Pennsylvania, the weakest link had 
failed. And our weakest link is ships. 



VIII 

of w 
of communications^ — Napo- 



6<nnjjE secret of war is the secret 



LEON. 



"The direction of military affairs 
is not half of the work of a general; 
to establish and guard the communi- 
cations is more important." — Napo- 
leon. 

"Any organization intended to 
maintain the efficiency of armies in the 
field must depend on communications 
with home being properly main- 
tained." — Von Schellendorff: 
"The Duties of the General Staff." 

"The best system of communications 
is powerless if there is no transport." 
— FuRSE : "Lines of Communication in 
War." 

28 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 29 

"It is an axiom that no army in the 
field can exist for a long time in an 
efficient condition unless it has safe 
communications with its base." — 
Furse: "Lines of Communication in 
War." 

"The lines of communication . . . 
are to be considered as so many great 
vital arteries." — Clausewitz. 

"The attacker should deprive the 
enemy of his communications without 
abandoning his own." — Jomini. 

"Special protection is, in addition, 
required for the lines of communica- 
tions of the army, by which all the 
necessaries of life are brought up to 
it." — Von der Goltz: "The Conduct 
of War." 

"The main roads in rear of an ad- 
vancing army should never be allowed 
to become empty. . . . The boldest 



30 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

and best plan will lead to ultimate 
failure, if the available resources do 
not hold out until we have successfully 
gained the final objective, the attain- 
ment of which ensures peace." — 
Clausewitz. 

"The defender will often have 
to abandon advantageous positions 
merely for the purpose of securing 
his lines of communication,^' — Von 
DER GoLTZ: "The Conduct of War." 

"The lines of communication should 
be made secure before everything." — 
Von DER GoLTZ: "The Conduct of 
War." 

"Further than this only general 
ideas can be drawn up for future ac- 
tion. As a rule, they will direct at- 
tention to separating the enemy from 
his most important communications, 
without which the further existence of 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 31 

his forces is imperilled. This is the 
easiest method of destroying the 
enemy in the sense in which we use the 
term in military language." — VoN der 
GoLTz: "The Conduct of War." 



IX 



T^HE British Admiralty tells us 
■*- once a week through the news- 
papers that the submarines have sunk 
ten ships, or eight ships, or twenty 
ships "of over 1,600 tons" — that is 
their phrase and in a way it has lulled 
us to sleep. The layman neglects the 
word "over"; in his mind he hastily 
multiplies 1,600 by ten, or even 
twenty; he thinks that doesn't sound 
very serious, and turns to the sporting 
page. But what the British Admiralty 
knows, and what our Shipping Board 
knows, and what every practical ship- 
ping man knows, is that "over 1,600 
tons" really means over 5,000 tons. 
Get that formula: over 1,600 tons 
means 5,000 tons. And the British 

32 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 33 

Admiralty knows, and our Shipping 
Board knows, that during a week 
when twenty ships "of over 1,600 
tons" are reported, the actual tonnage 
sunk by the submarines, including 
smaller ships and French ships and 
American ships and neutral ships, is 
about 150,000. And they know fur- 
ther that during the same week the 
amount of new shipping built by all 
the yards in all the Allied world was 
less than half the amount sunk by sub' 
marines. And they know further, as 
well as any man can know anything 
about the future, that the balance in 
favour of the submarine is going to be 
maintained for an indefinite time to 
come, 

I say "an indefinite time to come." 
And it is literally that. Of course, if 
the war continues into 1919, and if we 
are given time to get our shipbuilding 
under way — the everlastingly long 



34 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

time that our inefficiency demands — 
and if the Germans don't increase their 
submarine building as fast as we in- 
crease our shipbuilding, the time will 
come when we may reduce this appal- 
ling proportion in the submarine's 
favour. But that time is in the indefi- 
nite future. The official promisers 
hope that by the end of this year we 
shall have reduced the proportion to 
only 4 to 3 in the submarine's favour. 
But imagine that proportion as the ex- 
pression of a hope! 



TT is true we may increase our new 
■■■ construction. But when you put 
the word "may" before your verb, you 
are dealing in hope, luck, and blue 
sky. You can plan, you can "lay 
down a program," as they say; you 
can promise and get promises in re- 
turn — but you cannot be sure. You 
cannot foresee how accidents, or blind 
fate, or the forces of nature, may work 
against you. 

The grim and ominous fact is that 
England, with all the desperation of 
her need, with all the warning she has 
had, with all the intelligence and 
energy which she has put into the ef- 
fort to build more ships, is actually 

building fewer ships. Her output 
35 



36 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

during the early months of 1918 is 
only from a half to three-quarters of 
her output during the late months of 
1917. The explanation given is that 
the men are weary, that they have 
passed the high point of their capacity 
to do more even under pressure of 
great need ; that their second wind has 
come and gone, that human nature 
can do no more. In this we get a 
hint of what is meant by the phrase 
"a war of exhaustion." 

We, in America, are not weary, for 
we have not exerted ourselves. We 
may increase our new construction in 
time. But what I am willing to as- 
sert is that during the year 1918, now 
upon us, we shall not increase it 
to the necessary point. And what a 
cautious man will consider when he 
is in the world of "may" is what are 
the Germans likely to do in the way 
of increasing their submarines. On 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 37 

this point, the one thing we know cer- 
tainly is that they have already in- 
creased their speed and range. That 
fact is in the world of "is." I can- 
not see why they should not be able 
to increase the number of their sub- 
marines as fast as we increase the 
number of targets for them. It was 
just a little over a year ago that the 
Germans adopted their unrestricted 
submarine policy. Presumably, since 
they committed their fortunes to it, 
they have settled upon a policy of 
maximum submarine building. As it 
takes about a year for such a pro- 
gram of ship construction to get under 
way, we may assume that the Ger- 
man submarine builders are just now 
getting into their stride. 

But let us stay out of the world of 
speculation. Let us get into the 
world of past and present. In the 
realm of known facts this is the un- 



38 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

escapable truth: For every one ton of 
new ships built in 1917 by all the Al- 
lies and all the neutrals, the sub' 
marines sank more than two tons. 
And that proportion continues up to the 
hour when these words are being writ- 
ten, late in March, 1918. 

The facts are put thus in order to be 
simple and to arrive at a form of state- 
ment which can be readily understood 
and indisputably proved. Shipping 
tonnage is a complex subject, and this 
complexity is one of the conditions that 
have put a fog about it and kept the 
public from being aware of the coming 
crisis. When the British Admiralty 
speaks of tonnage, it means gross tons ; 
when our Shipping Board speaks of 
tonnage, it means dead weight tons; 
and many commercial authorities and 
newspapers, when they speak of ton- 
nage, mean yet other things, net ton- 
nage, or measurement tonnage, or 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 39 

displacement tonnage. These tech- 
nicalities need not be explained here. 
What the reader is assured is this : that 
the tons which the submarines are 
sinking are the same kind of tons that 
the Allies and neutrals are building, 
and that the record up to the present is 
more than two to one in favour of the 
submarine. 



XI 



TOURING 1917, the submarine de- 
-■-^ stroyed 6,618,623 tons. During 
the same year, Great Britain's entire 
new building was but 1,163,474 tons. 
The next largest builder was our- 
selves; we turned out just about 1,- 
000,000 tons. After these two, there 
are no countries that do enough ship- 
building to count in such totals as the 
submarine makes us deal in. All the 
other Allies, France, Italy, Japan, and 
in addition to them all the neutrals, 
Norway, Holland, Spain — all told, 
produced only 539,871. 

Add together all that was done by 
all the Allied countries and all the 
neutral countries, all the world out- 
side of Germany and Austria, and you 

40 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 41 

have but 2,703,345 tons. And the 
submarines destroyed just two and a 
half times as many. 

But the case is really worse than 
that. It is only the sinkings that are 
reported. The public is not informed 
of the ships which the submarines 
have incapacitated, which are towed 
limping to port, and which often turn 
out to be a more or less total loss. 
Nor is any account taken of the ships 
which are put out of commission 
through the normal operation of acci- 
dent or other misadventure. This 
source of loss is greater now than dur- 
ing peace times, for ships are badly 
manned; they run without lights, and 
in the emergencies of war they take big 
chances. Nor is any estimate given — 
it would be hard to make an estimate 
— of the loss of service due to the 
slowness of operation forced upon 
ships by guarding against the sub- 



42 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

marine, the waiting for convoys, tlie 
low speed entailed when every ship 
must wait upon the slowest in the con- 
voy, the inability to use some ports, 
the congestion of others. 

However, you grow desperate with 
trying to explain it with figures. 
What you feel like doing is to shout to 
Heaven that the submarine is beating 
the builders at the rate of two to one; 
that we are facing a crisis; that unless 
we Americans can now, this year, pull 
ourselves together and turn out as 
much tonnage in one month as we 
turned out in the whole year of 1917 
the world will suffer a calamity that 
you hesitate to put in words. 



XII 

"PEOPLE do not realize what a rela- 
-*■ tively frail thing and what a 
relatively small thing this tonnage is, 
the one institution upon which our 
civilization, at the moment, depends 
— the one thing that enables the na- 
tions to join hands with each other, 
the fragile thing upon which they rely 
for the comfort of communication, the 
stimulus and cheer of mutual help. 

All the ocean-going ships now in the 
Atlantic Ocean could be floated side 
by side in a not very big harbour. 
Their total surface would not be as 
large as a country town or a large 
Western farm. And if a few sub- 
marines got at them, they would work 
irreparable havoc among them in half 

43 



44 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

an afternoon. All the available ships 
now remaining afloat in the Allied and 
neutral world do not aggregate more 
than about 30,000,000 tons. And the 
submarine is sinking just about a 
quarter of them this present year. 

When you state it that way, you 
think of four years as the critical pe- 
riod. There is something just like 
this about the whole subject — some- 
thing that tends to send your mind off 
on wrong trails into a false security. 
It is not when the last Allied ship is 
sunk that the crisis will come. Star- 
vation does not wait on a nation until 
the last loaf of bread has been eaten. 
Starvation begins when the food sup- 
ply falls a certain percentage, a not 
very large percentage, below normal. 
And the Allied shipping has long been 
below normal. As long ago as Jan- 
uary 1, 1917, before we were in the 
war, before our army added to the 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 45 

need, the British estimated that ship- 
ping had fallen more than 300 vessels 
below their normal requirements. 
And bear in mind that our entrance 
into the war does not help, but makes 
worse, the shortage of shipping. 

At the present speed of operation, 
it takes a ton of shipping a year to 
carry one soldier to France — to carry 
one soldier just in his clothes without 
any supplies. To keep him supplied 
with food and rifles and ammunition 
and guns and shells and trucks and 
airplanes and locomotives and rails, 
takes an amount of shipping variously 
estimated at from four to ten tons. 
Call it six tons, and you will have light 
on some of the talk that we have heard 
and read about what we are going to 
do. It has been said in high quarters 
that we must send seven million sol- 
diers. And so we ought, and, prob- 
ably, ultimately must. But to talk 



46 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

about that in the present condition of 
our shipping is a grotesque joke. 
To send seven million soldiers and 
keep them supplied would take about 
twice as many ships as are now on all 
the oceans of the world. To send two 
million soldiers would consume the 
capacity of nearly half the ships afloat. 
And this would be in addition to pres- 
ent needs, which are already so great 
that a crisis is in sight. 

After Secretary Baker's testimony 
before a Senate investigating commit- 
tee early this year, the Washington 
Times ran a headline which read : 

BAKER DECLARES 1,500,000 WILL 
BE IN FRANCE IN 1918. 

And the New York Herald's headline, 
equally positive and equally definite, 
gave the figure as "2,000,000." Now 
the fact is Secretary Baker did not say 
that. He didn't say we would have 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 47 

2,000,000 soldiers in France this year. 
He didn't say we would have 1,500,- 
000 soldiers in France this year. He 
didn't say we would have 1,000,000 
soldiers in France this year. What he 
did say was this: "We will have 
more than a half million men in 
France early in 1918." 

And at that the Secretary is taking a 
considerable chance. It would be in- 
teresting to check the figures up on 
July 1. If, in order to make a record, 
he does send enough more soldiers to 
make up half a million, he will run 
the risk of embarrassing the British 
and French, who are dependent on us 
for supplies. And if he gets half a 
million American soldiers into France 
during the first half of the year, it will 
be most interesting to watch what hap- 
pens the second half. 

As soon as you get half a million 
soldiers into France at our present 



48 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

speed of operation, and considering 
the bulky nature of some of the things 
we must send, like airplanes, you have 
permanently mortgaged three million 
tons of shipping to keep them sup- 
plied. But the public, which glances 
at the headlines and doesn't read the 
testimony, thinks we are going to have 
a million and a half or two million 
soldiers in France this year. Thus 
another brick is laid in the structure 
of complacency which the American 
people have been building up. That 
brick will be used to hurl at some- 
body a few months later on, when the 
structure comes tumbling down. 

Of course, the careless and hasty 
headline writer is to blame. But 
there is an additional explanation. I 
think Secretary Baker is a little to 
blame. Rather, I should say he is 
partially responsible — but not so much 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 49 

to blame. There is something about 
this subject of shipping, a psycholog- 
ical quality which lends itself to 
equivocal construction. Everybody in 
official Washington is that way when 
talking for publication about ships and 
submarines. And so this false sense 
of security about the submarine has 
grown up. 

I think the explanation is this: the 
official custodian of the facts about 
the submarine is England. The few 
people in Washington who have the 
figures at all have them as an official 
secret from the British Admiralty. 
For purposes of its own that may be 
good or not, official England has 
chosen to be cryptic about the facts. 
And official Washington feels under an 
obligation to respect England's wishes, 
whether it thinks secrecy good judg- 
ment or not — and so, whenever a 



50 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

Washington official touches the subject 
of ships and submarines at all, he does 
it with an air of pussy-footing which 
leads the public to a false impression 
of security. 



XIII 

FOR over a year, ever since the "un- 
restricted" form of submarine 
warfare began, the proportion has 
been steadily and continuously more 
than two to one in favour of the sub- 
marine. During all that time we have 
lived through a rapidly accelerating 
diminution of ships. And yet, during 
all that time we have seen nothing in 
the newspapers in the nature of warn- 
ing. Nor have we received any warn- 
ing from public men, except one that 
came from former Chairman Denman 
of the Shipping Board in May, 1917, 
and which though repeated in June 
and July, went unheeded. 

Uniformly, the headlines in the 
newspapers have sounded optimistic, 

51 



52 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

as if the submarine were a peril that 
had passed, as if, somehow, we had 
eluded it, and that the laugh was on 
the Germans. Minor aspects of the 
situation would be picked out and ex- 
ploited, like this: "U. S. Adds More 
Tonnage Than Submarine Sinks." 
Now that headline was quite true, so 
far as it went. The United States, 
by taking over the German and 
Austrian ships, did add more to Amer- 
ican tonnage than the submarine sunk 
— of American tonnage. For there 
was very little American tonnage for 
the submarine to sink. The fact dis- 
closed in this particular piece of news 
meant nothing as respects the sub- 
marine situation as a whole. But the 
American reader got the idea that 
everything was all right. 

The pages of this book could be 
filled with headlines from American 
newspapers during the past year, all 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 53 

giving an optimistic slant to the news 
about the submarine. Whenever a 
week came in which the submarine 
sunk one or two ships less than the 
previous week, the newspapers pro- 
claimed "Submarine Effectiveness 
Failing." Whenever some enthusiast 
thought he had invented a non-sinkable 
ship, the newspapers told the story at 
length and on the first page. But 
when the naval experts got around to 
laughing the invention out of court, 
the newspapers made nothing of that 
news. 

It was not deliberate deception on 
the part of the newspapers and the 
headline writers. Partly, they were 
catering to our national psychology. 
We like to hear the thing of which 
we can boast, and we shrink from the 
facts that bring duty and sacrifice be- 
fore our eyes. 

In some cases the writers were as 



54 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

much misled as the rest of us. It 
wasn't their business to get all the facts 
about the submarine together and find 
out the true direction of events. In 
the nature of things the headline 
writer cannot be held to a standard of 
complete knowledge on all the subjects 
he deals with. To have all these facts 
together was the business of the British 
Admiralty. Indeed, the British Ad- 
miralty throughout the year followed 
a deliberate policy of keeping the 
facts away from the public. They 
knew what the facts were, and they 
knew what the public thought the facts 
were; and they did nothing about it. 



XIV 

T HAVE been at some pains to find 
-*- out what was the motive of the 
British Admiralty in concealing the 
facts, and giving out such reports as 
they did give out in the cryptic form of 
"ships under 1,600 tons" and "ships 
over 1,600 tons." The reason I got 
was this: that the submarine com- 
mander never or rarely can know the 
size of the ship he sinks; his only op- 
portunity to look at her lasts but a few 
seconds ; the consequence is he usually 
goes home and reports to the German 
navy that he has sunk a bigger ship 
than he really has; that later the true 
facts come out : that this makes friction 
between the submarine crews and the 

navy officials in Berlin; and that all 
55 



56 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

this helps to break down German 
morale. That is the reasoning as 
given to me. It sounds pretty ten- 
uous and far-fetched. Possibly the 
British Admiralty did not realize how 
seriously the American reader, who 
knows so much less of shipping than 
the English reader, would miscon- 
strue the phrase "over 1,600 tons." 
To every shipping man, the phrase 
meant an average of over 5,000 tons. 
But shipping men are very rare in 
America. If the information had 
come to us in terms of 5,000 tons, the 
delusion would not have lasted so long. 
The loss of a ship of 5,000 tons might 
have impressed us for what it is, a 
very serious matter. A ship of 5,000 
tons is a big and complex machine. 
To build it took, all told, from plates 
to completion, the work of a thousand 
men for a period of several months. 
Equivocation in a good cause is dan- 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 57 

gerous business. Equivocation be- 
gun for the purpose of deceiving the 
Germans led to some things which 
have been unpleasantly close to equiv- 
ocation for the sake of deceiving Eng- 
lishmen and Americans. The British 
Admiralty several times picked out 
minor and immaterial aspects of the 
whole case, and told the public and 
parliament, in terms of the graphic 
charts on which statistics are kept, 
that "the curves are satisfactory." As 
a matter of fact, there is only one 
graphic chart that shows the true net 
of the situation. 

Submarine sinkings may rise or fall 
in comparison with previous months; 
the destruction of submarines by de- 
stroyers may rise; but the only true 
net is this: the comparison of sub- 
marine sinkings with new construction, 
i.e., the state of the whole volume of 
shipping afloat in the Allied and neu- 



58 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

tral world — Is it holding its own? 
Is it being increased or decreased? 
A graphic method of showing that 
for the first year of "unrestricted" sub- 
marine warfare would look like this: 

Tonnage sunk by submarines 
New tonnage buih 

Sir Eric Geddes, on the anniversary 
of the German policy of unrestricted 
sinking, February 1, gave out a state- 
ment which included this sentence: 
"The submarine is held." Naturally 
that phrase of cryptic optimism was 
the one which found its way into the 
headlines. Now, if Sir Eric meant that 
statement in the narrow sense, that the 
submarine is not sinking more ships 
per week, or per month, than for- 
merly, he may possibly get away with 
it. But if he meant it in the sense 
that the American public took it, he 
cannot defend it. The natural mean- 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 59 

ing of that sentence is that the amount 
of shipping afloat is not being reduced. 
And in that sense the statement is 
fatally incorrect. 

Another of the optimistic statements' 
given out by the newspapers on Feb- 
ruary 1, contained the assertion that 
Great Britain buih last year 2,850,000 
tons. That statement contains about 
150 per cent, of inaccuracy. The 
true amount of tonnage built by Great 
Britain in 1917 was 1,163,474— a 
figure ominously below her normal 
output of new tonnage. And it is the 
output of new tonnage in its relation 
to submarine sinkings — the two taken 
together — that really shows the true 
condition. 

Under pressure of widespread 
questioning, late in March of the pres- 
ent year, the British authorities gave 
out some of the figures which they had 
previously kept secret. But again, as 



60 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

always, they put out their statement in 
such a form and accompanied by such 
an atmosphere of optimistic inference, 
as was likely to leave the public undis- 
turbed. The figures, so far as they 
went, were complete and detailed, and 
that fact too was calculated to give the 
public a false sense of assurance. ^^ 
But, complete and detailed as the fig- 
ures were, their arrangement was mis- 
leading. The public do not analyse 
the figures for themselves ; neither, un- 
happily, do the writers of the news- 
paper headlines. Both the public and 
the headline writers deal in phrases 
and impressions, and so again we have 
the chorus of "Submarine Situation 
Improves." 

The British Admiralty went back to 
the beginning of the war in August, 
1914, and gave the total submarine de- 
struction since that date; then they 
gave the total of new ship construction 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 61 

since that date. Then they compared 
the two, and the comparison did not 
look so bad — 11,827,572 tons sunk 
against 6,606,275 new tons built. 

But what the public do not realize, 
and what the British Admiralty realize 
but avoid pointing out, is this: these 
totals include thirty months when 
the submarine was working "re- 
stricted," working, that is to say, at 
only about one-third of its capacity; 
and only eleven months when the sub- 
marine was operating "unrestricted." 
This arrangement of figures looks 
plausible enough; but in truth no bet- 
ter arrangement could be invented 
from which to derive misleading to- 
tals, misleading averages, and to ac- 
quire a most dangerously misleading 
impression that, while the submarine 
is pretty serious, it is not ultimately 
terrifying. 

The true time to begin with the fig- 



62 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

ures is February 1, 1917, the date 
when the submarine began to operate 
"unrestricted." We are not able to 
begin there because the British Ad- 
mirahy did not give the figures by 
months, but merely by quarters. But 
take the figures as they are given to 
us; give the Admiralty the benefit of 
a "restricted" month, and begin with 
January 1, 1917. Here are the re- 
sults for the year 1917: 

Number of new tons built . . 2,703,355 
Number of tons sunk by sub- 
marine 6,623,623 

There you have the true situation. 
As a matter of fact, it is somewhat 
worse than this, for these figures, as 
has been said, include one month when 
the submarine was operating "re- 
stricted," at about one-third of its ca- 
pacity. The fact is that during the 
year 1917, when the submarine was 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 63 

working at full capacity — ^working the 
way in which we are fairly entitled to 
make deductions (because that is the 
way it is going to be working until 
the war ends) — during that period the 
submarine sank two and a half tons 
to every one ton built. 

To such a relation between sinkings 
and new building there can be only 
one end, and that end will be a tragic 
one for us unless the relation is 
changed. And, on the day when this is 
written, April 1, 1918, the relation has 
not materially changed. So far as it 
has changed at all, it has changed for 
the worse, because England and the 
United States have both been falling 
down tragically in the work of new 
construction. 



XV 

TT is given out from various author- 
-*- ties that we are doing better in the 
way of beating off the submarine. 
And we are. There can be no crit- 
icism of the activities of our Navy De- 
partment and the British navy, in the 
way of protection. The gallantry 
and ingenuity of both navies in hunt- 
ing the submarine down form one of 
the most cheering chapters of the war. 
It is not any magic new device that is 
capturing or checking the submarine. 
There isn't any magic device, although 
the newspapers have occasionally 
printed cryptic news which may well 
have led a part of the public to sup- 
pose a specific remedy for the sub- 
marine has been invented. No, it is 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 65 

only the use of all the old devices to 
the highest degree of effectiveness. 
And particularly, it is energy and 
courage on the part of the officers 
and crews. 

The only tested way to meet the sub- 
marine is the way that enemies and 
danger have always been met, if met 
successfully — by hunting it, by search- 
ing it out and chasing it up and down 
the ocean. It is being met not so 
much by any easy, patented protection, 
as by aggressive pursuit of it. 

And yet withal, the final, solemn un- 
escapable fact is that the submarine 
today, with our navy and the British 
navy both pursuing it, is doing just 
about as much damage to the Allies, 
all the factors considered, as it did 
more than a year ago with only the 
British navy opposing it. The thing 
we lose sight of is that, while our de- 
fensive improves, the submarine of- 



66 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

fensive improves too, and at a rate 
that, for practical purposes, all fac- 
tors considered, is step by step with 
our defence. 

When we talk about the real offset 
to the submarine, the building of new 
ships, there is no answer to it except 
a humiliating searching of hearts. 
Barring the warnings which were is- 
sued during the early days of the war, 
by former Chairman Denman of the 
Shipping Board, the Government has 
fed to us and to itself the most fatal 
kind of optimism. 

One who has been on the ground, 
who has studied the conditions, and 
who has no motive to feed the people 
with false incentives to hope, is able 
to say that we are falling down on the 
estimates that have been given as 
necessary to meet the need. The fixed 
fact of history is that during 1917, 
and right up to the present, we — 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 67 

meaning by "we" not merely the 
United States but all the Allies, and 
all the neutrals as well — we have been 
building less than half as many ships 
as the submarine has been destroying. 
As a matter of history, this opulent 
United States, with all its facilities and 
resources, during the month of Jan- 
uary, 1918, buih only 52,000 gross 
tons. And England built only a little 
more, about 58,000 tons. And that is 
all that was built. (The building of 
ships in other Allied and neutral coun- 
tries has become negligible.) Of the 
destruction by submarines during that 
month, the figures have not been given 
out; but if it was an average month, 
the submarine sunk just about five 
times as many tons as were built. 



XVI 

1\ /[" OST of our talk has been of our 
■^'-■- "program." "Program" is a 
word of the future and is tolerant of 
loose talk. It is in the world of hope, 
luck and blue sky. The President sev- 
eral months ago spoke of "the 6,000,- 
000 tons we will build in 1918." We 
shall not build them. The Chairman 
of the Shipping Board, Mr. Hurley, 
has spoken of 4,000,000 or 5,000,000. 
We shall not build them. We shall 
not build more than 3,000,000 tons. 
And 3,000,000 tons is not enough to 
avert calamity. 

What we are doing, primarily, is not 
building ships, but getting ready to 
build ships. Mr. Hurley knows this, 

and is sensible enough to say so. Be- 
es 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 69 

fore the Senate Committee he testified : 
"The work thus far has been in many- 
cases preparatory, and has carried 
with it the usual amount of annoyances 
and disappointments." 

We are engaged in an effort to in- 
crease, within a year, our ship-build- 
ing capacity between 1,200 and 1,500 
per cent. That is an immense task, 
and confusion has attended it. We 
are not a shipping nation any more 
than we are a military nation, and we 
are going through the awkward stum- 
blings of learning at one and the same 
time to fight on land and swim on 
water. But although we are not a 
shipping nation we are decidedly sup- 
posed to be a business nation. And 
it is in the field of business that we 
have fallen down. Our vital mistakes 
have occurred not in aquatics but in 
the field of business organization. 
Mr. Hurley recited one in his testi- 



70 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

mony before tlie investigating com- 
mittee of tlie Senate: 

''"We sent Uso tourist sleeping cars 
loaded witli men for Western ship- 
yards a short while ago. and we were 
asked to give tlieni priority to get tliem 
out tliere. .\nd tlien the Eastern ship- 
yards went out tliere and employed 
riveters awa^' from those veiy* yards on 
tlie Pacific Coast. . . . Tlie new ship- 
yards starting in difi'erent localities 
impaired tlie efficiency of the old-es- 
tablished yards, because they went out 
and hired men away from each odier. 
The new yard would give a bonus to a 
man to get him to work for tliem, and 
take him away from the other yard." 

That is to say, men w^ho are building 
ships have been hired away to build 
yards in which to get ready to build 
ships. 

Now that sort of blundering has 
notliing to do witli aquatics. No 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 71 

amount of knowledge of shipping, or 
experience in it, would have taught 
us how to avoid that particular kind 
of inefficiency. The qualities of or- 
ganization that apply to all big busi- 
ness are the ones that have been miss- 
ing in that kind of mistake. One be- 
gins to be dubious about the "busi- 
ness efficiency" America has boasted 
about. 

Another of the causes of our woeful 
delay in getting down to business in 
ship-building was described by Mr. 
Homer Ferguson, President of the 
Newport News Shipbuilding Com- 
pany, one of the big companies relied 
upon to construct the larger items in 
our program. Newport News, at the 
time we went to war, was a comfortable 
little city of 30,000. A year later it 
had 60,000 people, with all the inde- 
scribable confusion of new streets, new 
sewers, and new houses that results 



72 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

when a town more than doubles its 
population in a few months. Was the 
increase in population due to an in- 
crease in ship-building capacity? If 
it were, there would be comfort in the 
confusion. It was not. The primary 
cause of this boom was the action of 
the War Department in creating, 
alongside this little city devoted to 
shipbuilding, a new army encamp- 
ment, with all its demands on labour 
and housing. "Our situation was 
rendered ridiculous," said Mr. Fergu- 
son to the Senate Committee, "by this 
action of the War Department. ... I 
have information this morning that 
they could not get any water in the 
shipyard. The army has 15,000 
horses there, all using water, and we 
have 20,000 soldiers there using 
water. 

"We have the Navy Department 
work, which we are directed to expe- 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 73 

dite in every possible way, and we 
have the Shipping Board work, which 
we are directed to expedite as much as 
possible; and in the same week I have 
instructions from either one of the 
Government departments to give their 
work priority, and in the meantime 
the very people we are trying to 
serve are absorbing the facilities we 
must have for our people in order to 
do this work. ... I took this mat- 
ter up with the Secretary of War, and 
wrote him a letter, and discussed it 
with everybody in Washington I could 
discuss it with, and the Secretary is 
investigating and, I understand, pro- 
poses to put up some temporary quar- 
ters for the soldiers and the regular 
officers." 

When this was stated to the com- 
mittee Senator Johnson said: "That 
indicates lack of management and ut- 
ter lack of co-operation?" and Mr. 



74 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

Ferguson replied: "It is due to the 
fact that the people have the power to 
arbitrarily give orders without know- 
ing the consequences of the orders they 
give." 

Senator Johnson added: "And 
without knowing who else gives 
orders?" 

"Yes, Sir," replied Mr. Ferguson. 

Here with all the map of the United 
States to choose from, the War De- 
partment selected, as the place to 
build a cantonment (with all its de- 
mands on local labour and housing), 
a small city which was already relied 
upon by the navy and the Shipping 
Board to expand to double its size in 
taking care of the requirements of 
those two departments. 

The answer, of course, is that these 
three departments had never been 
brought together. There was no cen- 
tral planning and co-ordination — no 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 75 

"top-planning." It has not been in- 
experience in ship-building that has 
caused the worst blunders. It has 
been a lack of those qualities of busi- 
ness administration in which America 
has so long boasted her pre-eminence. 



XVII 

I HAVE dwelt upon the necessity for 
more tonnage. And by more ton- 
nage, I mean new tonnage, tonnage ac- 
quired through work. 

To a certain extent the responsible 
officials have been deluding themselves 
and the public by a process of beating 
the devil around the stump. When 
Secretary Baker was asked by the 
Senate Investigating Committee how 
he would be able to send to France so 
large a number of troops as he had 
said he would send, he disclosed the 
fact that among other devices he 
hoped to be able to get some ships 
from the Japanese. And it was a fact 
that negotiations with the Japanese 
were under way at that time. But im- 

76 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 77 

mediately thereafter there arose the 
crisis which made it necessary for the 
Japanese to consider their own prob- 
lem of possibly taking an army of 
their own to Siberia. Finally, when 
the negotiations came to an end, all 
that Japan gave us was 250,000 tons, 
about a two-weeks meal for the sub- 
marine. So long as you rely on 
makeshifts of this kind, the accidents 
are apt to run counter to your hopes. 
The Dutch ships have been taken 
over; but the Dutch ships were just as 
available for most of the Allied serv- 
ice when they were neutral as when 
they are under United States registry. 
Much has been made of the taking 
over of the German and Austrian in- 
terned ships. But all this is mere ex- 
pedient. It provides no new resource. 
It is the sort of thing a man does when 
bankruptcy threatens him; he digs up 
little stores from here and there. But 



78 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

the only thing that can surely save him 
is a new source of revenue. And the 
thing that we must have is a continu- 
ously flowing reservoir of new ton- 
nage, with a flow which must be at 
least as great as the rate of submarine 
destruction, and ought to be very much 
greater. 

There is nothing for it but new ships 
from new ship-yards. There is noth- 
ing for it but work. 



XVIII 

THE problem is primarily one of 
new ships. But it is also one of 
ships plus speed of operation. For if 
a ship is consuming sixty days for each 
round-trip, and you cut that down to 
thirty, you have, in effect, double the 
quantity of available tonnage. 

The director of operations for the 
United States Shipping Board is Mr. 
Edward F. Carry. As he was testify- 
ing before the Senate Investigating 
Committee, Senator Bankhead asked 
him this question: 

"How many days are required to 
make the round trip from New York 
and back?" 

Mr. Carry — "Under normal condi- 
tions you mean?" 

79 



80 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

Senator Bankhead — "Yes.'* 

Mr. Carry — "They ought to make a 
round trip in three weeks. Now that 
the congestion is so great, it takes 
from fifty to sixty days to make a 
round trip." 

That point, so grim in its signifi- 
cance, passed unnoticed by the sena- 
torial investigators. Consider this: 
with this speed of operation, it takes 
about one ton of shipping one year to 
carry one soldier to Europe. That, if 
you reflect upon it, is appalling. 
Some of the facts that make it ap- 
palling are unescapable and must be 
faced. The rest arise from intoler- 
able inefficiency. 

One of the seized German ships now 
used in carrying our soldiers to 
France, has a tonnage of about 20,000. 
With this capacity she carries about 
3,500 soldiers per trip. To carry as 
many soldiers as her tonnage, 20,000, 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 81 

she must make six trips. Under pres- 
ent conditions she is making at the 
rate of just six trips a year. She con- 
sumes sixty days for each round trip. 
She ought to make it in less than thirty 
days. When she was operated by her 
German captain and his Hamburg- 
American crew she used to make the 
round trip in three weeks. The dif- 
ference between sixty days and twenty- 
one days is not wholly accounted for 
by war. The submarine is not re- 
sponsible for all of that. 

To be sure, a fast passenger ship 
cannot go at top speed because she 
must keep step with her convoy. But 
that only accounts for a few days. 
The difference between sixty days and 
thirty days is the difference between 
Hamburg-American management and 
unhyphenated American management. 
It is the difference between German 
efficiency and — where did we hear that 



82 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

phrase before — American efficiency. 
As a Washington official said in the 
safety of private conversation: "The 
great American bluff is being called, 
and the show-down isn't pretty to look 
at. We are turning out to be two- 
spots; and in a show-down two-spots 
are valuable only when found in a 
rigidly limited order and arrange- 
ment." 

We used to laugh a good deal at 
Russia about the congestion at Arch- 
angel. Returning travellers and the 
newspapers used to tell us about the 
acres and acres of supplies piled up 
on the docks, and for miles back of 
the docks, both at Archangel and Vla- 
divostok, without adequate transporta- 
tion facilities to get them to the front, 
where they were needed. We used to 
say, with kindly tolerance, that Russia 
wasn't a grown-up nation, that she 
hadn't developed the genius for or- 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 83 

ganization. Well, within a few 
months that Russian situation is going 
to be duplicated in the United States. 
We are making guns, rifles, shells, air- 
planes, and other supplies many times 
as fast as we can possibly transport 
them to the only point where they are 
of any use. Mr. Hurley says there 
are munitions now in the United 
States, already manufactured, which 
will not reach France for two years, 
because of the lack of ships. 

Everything comes back to ships. 
This nation is manufacturing muni- 
tions at the rate of five times the carry- 
ing capacity of our shipping. We are 
turning out some millions of tons of 
goods which are of use only at one 
spot on the earth's surface, the battle 
front in France. And we have not 
got, because we did not plan and co- 
ordinate, one-fifth the amount of ship- 
ping necessary to carry those muni- 



84 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

tions to the spot where they must go. 
It is as if we had built a huge factory 
with only a two-by-five door out of 
which to move the finished product 
and with only a narrow-gauge rail- 
road and a donkey engine to get it to 
market. 

The result is going to be worse than 
you will realize unless you reflect 
upon it. The stuff is going to pile 
up on our docks, and back up on our 
switches, and congest our railroads to 
the point of paralysis, and our great 
war machine will have to slow down 
before it has fairly got under way. 
The consequences, economic and mili- 
tary, are going to be extremely seri- 
ous. And they will be on us in only 
a few weeks. 

It is just a year ago the sixth of 
next month that we began to manufac- 
ture shells and guns. And it is only 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 85 

today that we are trying frantically to 
get the men to build the yards to build 
the ships to carry these shells and guns 
to France. 



XIX 

"EVERYTHING comes back to this 
-" one word — ships. The recent 
order of President Wilson and Mr. 
Hoover, enforcing a reduced consump- 
tion of wheat, was called a food order. 
In reality it had to do, not with a 
scarcity of food, but with the scarcity 
of ships. The wheat is there — mil- 
lions of bushels of it, but there are no 
ships to carry it. Thereby hangs one 
of the most picturesque incidents of 
the war. 

Three years ago the Australian 
Government bought and contracted 
for all the wheat crop of that country. 
Then it bought some twenty-one ships 
to carry the wheat to Europe. But the 
submarine has had its way with those 

86 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 87 

ships, and today not more than four or 
five of them are left. Meantime the 
wheat has been piling up along the 
Australian docks and railroads. 
They put some of it in sacks, made 
walls of the sacked wheat, and poured 
the rest within the walls. 

Along the railroads in the interior 
of Australia there were great bins of 
wheat ten or twenty feet high and 
wide, and more than ten miles long. 
Soon mice appeared. . They began to 
gnaw through the bags, and the 
hempen walls collapsed. Under such 
favourable conditions, the mice mul- 
tiplied until they became a plague. 
The Government put its shoulder to the 
perfectly serious business of fighting 
mice. It had special ways of catch- 
ing them, and crews of men with 
specially constructed incinerators. 
Night after night they burned five to 
ten tons of mice in a single night. 



88 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

But the mice continued to increase. 
On the soil of Australia, for a few 
days, man's age-long contest with the 
forces of nature became an acute 
pitched battle. Man won a respite 
only when some mysterious law of na- 
ture brought a plague upon the mice, 
a disease described as a sort of soft 
ringworm. Then the mice, fleeing 
from the infection, deserted the wheat 
piles and ravaged the fields, so that 
the new crop of Australian wheat is 
only a fraction of what normally it 
ought to be. 

Meantime, men who had been try- 
ing to salvage the piled-up wheat were 
infected by the disease whose germs 
had been left in the wheat by the de- 
parting mice. From the workmen the 
infection spread to their families and 
neighbors. That is the story as given 
to me by an Australian official. It 
ought to be tempting to some writer 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 89 

who has the talent to do it justice and 
the leisure to get more of the details. 
There in Australia — about as far 
away from the battle fields as you can 
get and remain on this earth — is a 
sort of huge cancer, a direct result of 
the war — more specifically a direct 
result of the famine in ships, a direct 
result of the submarine. 



XX 

THE war is 3000 miles away from 
us. You can tell the nature of 
a man by the way he speaks of this 
3000 miles. To the timid it gives an 
\ agreeable sense of security. To the 
half-hearted, it is a source of satisfac- 
tion. To those who hope there will be 
a negotiated peace, or that the war 
will be ended somehow without our 
making any serious sacrifice, this 
3000 miles is an advantage. But to 
the brave this distance is not a safe- 
guard; it is a difficulty. If we really 
want to fight, if we wish to be in the 
war, if we want to come to grips with 
the enemy, then this three thousand 
miles is our greatest handicap. 

90 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 91 

If there were such a thing as calling 
for a miracle and getting it, if an 
omnipotent being should do the one 
thing that would help us most toward 
throwing all our strength against Ger- 
many, the thing he would do would be 
this: He would pick up this conti- 
nent of ours and set it down along side 
France, New York touching Havre, 
Savannah touching Bordeaux. Pic- 
ture how that would change the face 
of the war. But there is no answer 
to a prayer except it starts from our 
own hearts; and the only miracle that 
springs to our help in time of des- 
perate need is the miracle of our own 
capacity when necessity makes us dip 
the bucket to the very bottom of the 
resources within ourselves. Never- 
theless the truth is this particular 
miracle can be approximated. We 
can put across the Atlantic Ocean 
what in effect would be a bridge join- 



92 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

ing us to France. We can, if we go to 
the highest of our energies and the 
deepest of our resources, build ships 
so many, so fast and so co-ordinated 
that soldiers and supplies can go on to 
the battle-front as expeditiously as if 
the two continents were touching. 
But we can only achieve this by the 
uttermost effort of our capacities. 

William James has an allusion to 
the familiar phenomenon called "sec- 
ond-wind," that higher and quicker 
functioning of lungs and heart and 
spirit which comes to us only after we 
have exhausted what is our ordinary 
best. Ordinarily we pass into second- 
wind only when there is the stimulus 
of some terrible need, when we are 
pursued by a devil of desperation. 
But James' essay makes the point that 
in place of a devil of desperation, we 
can substitute our own will-power, if 
we have the will-power; that all of us, 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 93 

if our wills were strong enough and 
well-disciplined enough could go 
through life or second-wind all the 
time. The occasional man who does 
this becomes, in the eyes of the in- 
dolent rest of us, a sort of super-man. 
But all of us can do it. If this crisis 
of shipping could be made vivid 
enough to us, we would see in it just 
such a devil of menace as would 
stimulate us to our second-wind. 

Some one of our ancestors who 
invented the metaphors which still 
form the bulk of our figures of speech, 
spoke of "the crack of doom," hence 
we all think of doom as something 
that comes with a crash, something 
that startles us and is easily recogniza- 
ble. The truth is that only occasion- 
ally does doom come in that way. 
It generally comes gradually, fur- 
tively, by the slow, unnoticed disin- 
tegration of one prop after another. 



94 . WAKE UP AMERICA! 

It is only the completed thing, the ac- 
cumulated product that makes a 
noise. It is hardly of the nature of 
doom to announce itself with trum- 
pets. It is part of the devilishness of 
most forms of doom that they creep 
upon us. 

I wonder would this situation reach 
our hearts if we should send couriers 
through the country like Paul Revere, 
calling out "two to one; two to one"; 
if we should have the police in the 
cities warn each home just as he would 
give warning of fire or of flood ; if we 
should adopt a code for all our bells 
and whistles and gongs, and sound 
them as we do when fire threatens. 
The menace is not less great, only the 
nature of it is such that it appears 
distant, furtive and scattered. 

Mr. Edward A. Filene, an official 
of the United States Chamber of Com- 
merce, is a citizen who has grasped 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 95 

this situation, and is doing what he 
can to make others see it. He travels 
about the country, calling meetings of 
citizens, and pointing out that this 
business of shipbuilding is a work not 
merely for the men who handle rivets 
and swing sledges and receive wages 
from the ship-yard, that it is the con- 
cern of everybody, and that everybody 
can find a way to help. 

One of his suggestions has appealed 
to me especially because it is a means 
of bringing average citizens into di- 
rect and vital participation in the 
work. He points out that in many 
cases, the sudden expansion of ship- 
building activity near a city, and the 
congestion of labour on the water- 
front, has more or less paralysed the 
ordinary street-car facilities which 
carry workmen from their homes to 
the shipyard ; and he suggests that the 
private owners of automobiles take 



96 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

to themselves the task of carrying the 
men to and from their work. 

I like this because it provides a way 
for the maximum number of people 
to volunteer. It is of the nature of 
the things we do in an emergency, and 
what is needed is that we should all 
recognize that it is an emergency, just 
as much an emergency as if a fire 
were sweeping the town. 

We should do our best, and we 
are not doing our best. At the end of 
a year of war we have a hundred and 
fifty thousand men building ships. 
We ought to have a million. We 
should build ships and ships and 
ships. And then we should build 
faster ships. And after that we 
should build more ships. We should 
build steel ships and wooden ships 
and concrete ships and composite 
ships. We should build anything that 
will float. If it is not adapted to de- 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 97 

fence against the submarine, we can 
use it to bring manganese from Brazil 
for our guns and rubber from Ceylon 
for our military trucks. 

Not only must we maintain that 
line of ships between ourselves and 
our little newborn army. There is an- 
other need just as essential. En- 
dowed as this country is for the manu- 
facture of munitions, there are a few 
essential elements which we have not 
got, or have in insufficient quantity; 
we are compelled to bring these 
across water. Among them are 
manganese and rubber and chrome 
and nitrates and hemp. We cannot 
have too many ships. There is no 
such thing as too many ships. If a 
Cajun fisherman in the swamps of 
Louisiana can hollow out a log big 
enough to float a bale of sisal hemp 
across from Yucatan by all means 
urge him to do it. 



98 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

In San Francisco, two business men, 
who had no more responsibility for 
the situation than the general respon- 
sibility of all of us, and who had no 
experience in ship-building, have 
made possible an experiment in ships 
built of concrete. They ventured the 
very large sum of money required, and 
hired a house architect to make the ex- 
periment. At the time this book is 
written, the tests are not yet complete, 
for while the structure is afloat it has 
not yet been tried with the engines at 
work in it. If the experiment is suc- 
cessful, it will be an important 
achievement, for it adds a new and 
easily procured material to the limited 
number out of which ships can be 
built. But apart from all that, the 
spirit of the group who made the ex- 
periment is the important thing. 
That is the kind of spirit that will 
master the emergency. 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 99 

There is a way in which all can 
help. It must be accepted, that any 
one who can help will want to help, 
for such a belief rests upon our faith 
in human nature. Every one can 
help by saving the last available bit 
of man-power for the building of 
ships. We have a given quantity of 
man-power in the country. It cannot 
be increased or stimulated. Famine 
in it cannot be escaped, and all other 
famines and scarcities go back to this 
one famine. 

Upon the reserves of man-power 
war has already made enormous de- 
mands. To consider but one ex- 
ample, the aviation department of 
our army, when we entered the war, 
a year ago, consisted of eleven officers 
and seventy-five men. Today it con- 
sists of over a hundred thousand men. 
That is an increase of more than ten 
thousand per cent. The increases in 



100 WAKE UP AMERICA! 

other essential military activities are 
on the same scale, and all these in- 
creases must come from the same fixed 
quantity of man-power. 

Under these circumstances the 
thing that any thoughtful, patriotic 
person must do is to avoid the use 
of any man-power that he can 
possibly get along without. Such a 
determination will express itself 
chiefly in refusal to use luxuries. 
Some of our luxuries come from 
abroad. In coming from abroad they 
consume ship space which otherwise 
could be carrying wheat and bullets to 
France. And the rest of our luxur- 
ies, made in this country, consume 
man-power which otherwise could be 
building ships. 

During the Napoleonic wars, there 
was a fine old Scotch Presbyterian 
preacher who, from his pulpit in 
Edinburgh used to pour forth the 



WAKE UP AMERICA! 101 

stores of his eloquence in order that 
he might keep his people in fortitude 
and right faiths of living during that 
twenty-six years' strain of contest 
against autocracy. Once Thomas 
Chalmers said: "If I were a states- 
man I should not hesitate to deprive 
my countrymen of the last of their 
luxuries, so long as the first of their 
liberties were in danger." 



THE END 



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